American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. RALPH WALDO EMERSON,

I profit from a philosopher only insofar as he can be an example. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE,

For Nietzsche, Emerson represented a new flora and fauna of thought. He discovered in this American essayist and poet a new kind of thinker who believed that ontology and epistemology were useful only insofar as they addressed the fundamental question of philosophy: not What is the nature of being? What are the conditions of knowledge? or How do I know? but rather, as Emerson put it, “How shall I live?”

Nietzsche admired the ease with which Emerson made philosophy an ally of, rather than a retreat from or a corrective to, one’s own experiences and longings.

“the most fertile author of this century has so far been an American.”

Nietzsche on Emerson

Nietzsche’s Emerson volumes are the most heavily annotated books in his personal library.21 His marginalia are almost exclusively eruptions of approval: “Bravo!” “Ja!” “Sehr Gut!” “Herrlich!” “Das ist wahr!” He often brought his Emerson volumes with him on vacation,

“In important respects,” Kateb argues, “Nietzsche was Emerson’s best reader.”

“Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.”

And so it was in this period of personal turmoil that Nietzsche, age seventeen, first got his hands on a translation of Emerson’s The Conduct of Life (1860) and first got an idea of what philosophy could make possible.

I got Plato's Republic at the same age

If, as Emerson had said, “there is no pure originality. All minds quote,” and that “only an inventor knows how to borrow,” then Nietzsche proved to be quite inventive in his appropriation of Emerson’s ideas and images to wrestle with his doubts about religion.

Why not borrow again?

It worried Nietzsche that the quest for a freer standpoint from which to consider human reality might cause “great revolutions once the masses finally realize that the totality of Christianity is grounded in presuppositions; the existence of God, immortality, Biblical authority, inspiration, and other doctrines will always remain problems.”

The post modern condition

For Nietzsche, it was disturbing to consider the sheer range of external forces, “stifling the capacity of the soul through force of habit.” What troubled him was not simply that “we have been influenced,” but that we are so blind to influences that we cannot tell the difference between our self and the world, our independence and our inheritance.

“If it became possible completely to demolish the entire past through a strong will, we would immediately be transported into the realm of autono-mous gods, and world history would suddenly be for us nothing but a dreamy self-deception: the curtain falls, and man finds himself like a child playing with worlds, like a child who awakens at the glow of dawn and, laughing, wipes the terrible dreams from his brow.”

Hasn't this been done by totalitarian regimes & arguably the internet

Here lies every important, unending problem: the question of justifying the individual to the people, the people to mankind, and of mankind to the world. And here, too, is the fundamental relationship of fate and history.”

Emerson also provided warnings that while life on the open waters without inherited truths promises ever becoming, it also

“the sea of doubt without compass and guide[,] most will be driven off course by storms; only very few discover new lands. Out in the middle of the immense ocean of ideas one often longs to return to firm land.”

“In general, every evil to which we do not succumb, is a benefactor,”

“What does not kill me makes me stronger.”

For Nietzsche, Emerson provided an image of the philosopher willing to go it alone without inherited faith, without institutional affiliation, without rock or refuge for his truth claims.

Beware,’ says Emerson, ‘when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.’”

“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone,” Nietzsche insisted. “There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead? Do not ask, go along it.”

“A man never rises higher than when he does not know whither his path [will] lead him.”

First on his list was the notion of eternal truth. He sought to demonstrate that no values are inherently good or evil but rather are culturally and historically contingent.

Likewise, he argued that all claims to moral truth were nothing more than “human, all-too-human” desires for a particular vision of the good life, but not mirrors of extrahuman reality.

While Nietzsche sought to dismantle the notion of universal truth and goodness, so too did he try to discr...

God had not created man in his image; rather man created an image of God in order to give life meaning, purpose, and a moral center.

According to Nietzsche, modern Western culture was founded on a pack of lies:truth, universal morality, God. These were mere fictions, products of human imagination, which had no basis in the real world.

American encounters with Nietzsche ignited and revealed larger anxieties about the source and authority of truth and values in a modern pluralist society.

Metaphysics and positivism represented, for Nietzsche, opposing sides of the same coin: both were grounded in the principle of universal truth. Metaphysics rested on the belief in timeless foundations of universal values, whereas positivism assumed the universality of the scientific method and objectivity.

“Just how far this mode of thought has brought me, how far it will still carry me—I almost dread to imagine. But there are paths that do not allow one to turn back; and so I go forward, because forward I must.”

The most prominent readers fascinated with Nietzsche’s work came from left-leaning liberationist, progressive circles, including anarchists, socialists, feminists—both hard-boiled Marxist materialists and more aesthetically inclined romantic radicals. However, the early fascination with Nietzsche cut across the political spectrum, as right-leaning cultural conservatives were also drawn to his writings.

Nietzsche's early readers

Nietzsche’s philosophy made its first significant debut in American literature in September 1892 in Robert Reitzel’s German-language, leftist newspaper, Der Arme Teufel. Reitzel, a German-born, defrocked Reformed minister, made a career as an essayist, poet, and prominent speaker on the free-thought lecture circuit before founding his newspaper as his new pulpit in 1884.25

In his eleven-part series, “Sermons from the New Bible: Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Reitzel characterized Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as a modern work of sacred scripture. Unlike the New Testament, though, Nietzsche’s bible “made a stoic appeal to the working for reality.”

Though a “unified work for eternity,” he warned that it was also “an apocalypse from which today’s sick draw resources without getting cured.” Nevertheless, he encouraged his readers to bear Nietzsche’s hard truths

Nietzsche instructed, As long as the State, or rather the government, regards itself as the guardian of the minor masses, and [on] their behalf considers the question whether religion shall be maintained or abolished, it will most probably always decide in favor of the maintenance of religion…. [For] when the necessary or accidental shortcomings of government … become apparent to the intelligent, and fill them with the sentiment of hostility, the unintelligent will fancy they see the fingers of God, and patiently submit to the commands from above.

Nietzsche explained that true freedom requires that no states of belonging—whether religious, economic, political, or even moral—be compulsory.

He may be utilized “profitably,” but not “prophetably.”

Well put

“Whoso has attained even only in a degree to the freedom of reason cannot feel himself other than as a wanderer on the earth—even if not as a traveller toward a final destination: for there is none.”

Schumm argued that Nietzsche’s problems would become America’s problems in the new century.

All turned to Nietzsche as evidence that modern individuality can only be achieved, not inherited, and that it is the product of a free mind, not a free market.

Nietzsche demonstrated that the intellect, once it frees itself of all binding illusions philosophical, religious, and cultural, knows no piety, no party, and no platform.